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“... promoted to Major-General, after 21 years of service. In 1807 came his first encounters with the French when, as commander of Bennigsen’s advance guard in Poland, he fought the Grande Armée at Pultusk, Hof and on the first evening at the dreaded Eylau, where he was seriously wounded in the right arm. This apparent setback proved to be of crucial ...”

“... and instead he travelled, with the support of the Spanish crown, to the Americas. Accompanied by a French botanist called Aimé Bonpland, Humboldt left La Coruña in June 1799, stopping briefly in Tenerife before sailing on to Venezuela. There they explored the Orinoco and established its connection with the Amazon river system. They navigated the Orinoco in a ...”

“... sonatas into the small hours and traipsing up mountains in Lederhosen; Louis de Broglie, a young French aristocrat, who studied literature and history before brazenly introducing the notion that solid matter might consist of waves; and Erwin Schrödinger, a dapper Austrian who led a surprisingly bohemian life: openly promiscuous, he sustained a string of ...”

“... half-crust. (‘That bread alone was worth the journey,’ they probably remark, just as Elizabeth David says of a trip to an out-of-the-way eatery in France.) Art has a morality of its own, and the aesthetics of cooking and eating aspire, in ‘foodism’, towards the heights of food-for-food’s sake. Therefore the Third World can go suck its fist.The ...”

“... With the death of Michel Foucault the end of another era of French philosophy suddenly seems imminent. Jean-Paul Sartre died long after the Existentialist era had dwindled, and that phase of his philosophical work had been absorbed. Like Jacques Lacan’s death, however, Foucault’s comes at a point where debate has not settled the question of either the viability of his vision or the importance of the Post-Structuralist period ...”

“... Both David Cressy and Cynthia Herrup believe they are writing microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the detailed stories of individual trials ...”

“... and entertaining contributions. Hugh Trevor-Roper discusses the origins of Scottish kitsch; David Cannadine the (not at all remote) origins of British royal ritual; other contributions concern British rule in India and Welsh cultural identity (treated more respectfully than Trevor-Roper treats poor old Scotland). Eric Hobsbawm both introduces and ...”

“... ignored. Even in France he is more of an intellectual curiosity than an object of reverence. The French Republic has had too many constitutions, too many false gods and too many false dawns to go in for the hero-worship of its founding fathers that gives Americans such satisfaction. Sieyès contributed to some of the shortest-lived of those ...”

“... Similar mathematical handbooks and tables had been produced for centuries. Around the time of the French Revolution, as Lorraine Daston has written, leading civil servants produced mammoth tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions calculated to 14 or more decimal places – far greater precision than any practical application would then have ...”

“... disparity up to American exceptionalism, but that’s more a slogan than an explanation. And as David Garland points out in Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, on this and many other matters of criminal justice, the United States is not so much a single nation as a federation of 50 states, each of which has substantial ...”

“... has passed largely unregarded and unrebuked, treated instead as normal, natural and reasonable. David Kuchta’s revisionist history makes male clothing the centre of attention. Despite the dates of his study, Kuchta concentrates on the rise of Whig philosophy in England from the late 17th century onwards, and the development of a new, steady, English civic ...”

“... La Fontaine’s permanent place in the schoolroom has made him the most widely read of all French writers. Children take his menagerie of talking flora and fauna in their stride. Grown-ups, however, worry about his howlers (grasshoppers don’t eat worms) and mutter about the ambiguity of his moral lessons. Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers ...”

“... two of Alan’s brothers, Ronnie and Victor. Alan was born (in 1883) at Bagnères-de-Bigore in the French Pyrenees, where his parents habitually wintered both for its agreeable climate and its hunting – the fashionable area around Pau was known as ‘the Leicestershire of France’. He spoke French before he learnt English ...”

“... were published at the time in La Révolution surréaliste; the other ten were unknown until a French edition edited by José Pierre appeared three years ago. This translation has an Afterword by Dawn Ades, characteristically learned, limpid and illuminating. Incidentally, Pierre’s use of the word ‘transcripts’ to describe the reports of the ...”

“... and distinction: diplomat, politician, man of letters, an expert on Africa, Irish history and French literature. International affairs have interested him since his UN days in the late Fifties, when his ideas were close to Sartre’s. In a book on Camus published in 1970, O’Brien berated Camus for not supporting Sartre: had he done so, together they ...”